Part of my job is to talk to the news media and help them be accurate in their aviation safety stories. Usually, my quotes are pretty popular, but recently one struck a nerve with a few people. I was working with a reporter from Bloomberg who was writing a difficult piece on U.S. regulatory policy. I said, “If anyone wants to advance safety through regulation, it can’t be done without further loss of life.” That sounds pretty harsh, but I stand by it. I am not calling for more fatalities or more regulation, but drawing attention to the fact that we are going down a very odd regulatory path in the largest aviation nation in the world, and it merits a thoughtful discussion.
Since the 1980s, every American president has issued executive orders requiring U.S. regulators to do detailed cost-benefit studies on every safety regulation. There are lots of things you can use to justify a regulation, but for aviation safety it largely is about pointing to a record of f…
